The Midden

by Tom Sharpe

  He pushed himself away from the bathroom wall and staggered down the passage again and had opened the bedroom door before another alarming thought hit him. He’d never heard her make a noise like this. And naturally she had thought he’d be staying in Tween as he usually did after a heavy night. Perhaps that horrible butch Aunt Bea was sleeping in his bed. If she was, the old slut was in for a nasty surprise. He might not like his wife, but he was damned if he was going to have a lesbian take his place in his own bedroom. The Chief Constable moved towards the bed very cautiously with his hand out and as he groped about towards those snores, his fingers touched some hair. In the darkness Sir Arnold Gonders froze in his shambling tracks. That wasn’t Vy’s hair – he’d know her curls anywhere – and it wasn’t Bea’s either, hers was short and straight. The stuff he’d just felt was long and greasy. It was a man’s hair and, come to that, those were a man’s snores. There was no mistaking the fact. There was no mistaking something else either. The smell.

  He knew now why Genscher was limping and wheezing. He also knew that he was dealing with an exceptionally dangerous intruder. All his life he’d known something like this was going to happen if Vy left the bloody door open – in his drunken and exhausted state he wasn’t thinking at all clearly. The possibility of the house being taken over by the IRA flashed through the Chief Constable’s disordered mind. He had to get to his gun in the bedside drawer, the gun and the panic button. With the utmost caution he felt for the bedside table and began to ease the drawer open. The damned thing was stuck. He pulled harder and the thing came a short way out with a loud squeak. The next moment there was a movement on the bed. Sir Arnold hesitated no longer. If he couldn’t get to his gun . . . his hand groped around inside the drawer but there was no gun and no panic button. Grasping the wooden bedside lamp by its top he swung the base down onto the snores. A horrid thud, the bulb in the lamp shattered, the plug came out of the wall socket and the snores stopped. In the darkness Sir Arnold stepped back to the main light switch by the door, trod on a piece of broken bulb, cut his foot and swore.

  By the time he’d managed to turn the light on it was fairly clear that things were more dreadful than even he had anticipated. For one thing Lady Vy was awake – she had been kicked into a semblance of life by the reflex convulsion of Timothy Bright’s legs – and without her contact lenses was having difficulty telling who was who. Beside her in the bed what she imagined was Sir Arnold lay bleeding horribly from a scalp wound while a naked man with some sort of club in his hand was swearing horribly over by the door. To Lady Vy’s boozy anti-depressed mind it seemed obvious she was about to be raped and murdered. Acting with remarkable speed for a woman in her condition, she scrabbled for the Chief Constable’s revolver which she’d kept handy in her own bedside drawer. It was her ultimate line of defence and she meant to use it. Her first shot hit the mirror in the Victorian wardrobe to the murderer’s right. Lady Vy tried to aim more carefully for the second and as she did so she was vaguely conscious that her attacker was yelling at her in a faintly familiar voice. ‘For fuck’s sake put that fucking gun down –’

  The second shot missed him on the other side and, having gone in one side of the hot-water boiler and out the other, ricocheted round the en-suite bathroom. There was no need for a third shot. Sir Arnold had scampered through the door and slammed it behind him. Lady Vy reached for the panic button which had been installed to alert every police station within a radius of fifty miles that the Chief Constable’s weekend residence had been entered by intruders.

  To Sir Arnold Gonders the next half hour was a foretaste of hell. As the siren on the roof began to wail and the entire building was brilliantly floodlit by halogen lamps in the garden while simultaneously a dozen police stations were alerted to a Top Priority Emergency, he knew that his career was on the brink of an abyss. He hurled himself down the darkened staircase and was halfway to the telephone in his study when the hall lights came on and he was confronted by the elderly Scots housekeeper in her dressing-gown.

  ‘Och Sir Arnold, do you ken wha’s ganging on?’ she asked.

  The Chief Constable brushed her aside with the bloodied bedside lamp. The stupid old cow, of course he didn’t know what was going on. Once in his study he dropped the lamp on a valuable Persian rug and grabbed the phone. The number, the coded number to cancel the alert? What the hell was it? Finally, in desperation, he dialled 999 and was asked which of the Emergency Services he required. It was a rather more relevant question than he realized at the time, though the house had yet to catch fire.

  ‘Police,’ he barked and was put through to a recorded message asking him to be patient as Police Services were stretched to the limit. Sir Arnold knew that. He had dictated the message to his secretary himself.

  ‘While you are waiting to be attended to,’ the soothing female voice went on, ‘we at Twixt and Tween Police Services would like you to know about the ancillary assistance we are able to offer the public. Officers are always on hand to conduct Road Safety Classes at schools of all levels, Primary, Secondary, Further and Independent. We also hold regular classes in Self-Defence for Senior Citizens and Persons of the Female Gender. These are available at –’

  ‘Fuck off, you bitch,’ shouted the Chief Constable and slammed the phone down. A new and even more awful possibility had just entered his mind. Vy and a young man in bed . . . A toyboy! He had to think of some way of stopping scores of policemen converging on the house in which he had almost certainly murdered his wife’s lover. But first he had to find a way of turning that infernal siren off. Livid with a fresh terror he dashed back across the hall to the kitchen in search of the fuses and was blundering about in the pantry where they had been. The fucking things had been moved. That Vy and her electricians. And what was the point of having Emergency Services if you couldn’t get through to the sods. The other inhabitants of the house weren’t helping. As he turned back towards the study with the intention of blasting that bleeding siren on the roof into silence with his shotgun he came face to face with Auntie Bea.

  ‘Has something dreadful happened?’ she enquired, at the same time studying his anatomy with only slight interest and considerable disgust. ‘I thought I heard shots and then all those incredible lights came on and that dreary siren. Can’t you switch it off?’

  ‘No,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘And nothing serious has happened.’

  ‘Well, I certainly can,’ said Auntie Bea. Behind her in the study the phone had begun to ring. For a moment they grappled in the doorway and then the Chief Constable broke loose and hurried to the study. In the kitchen Bea found the mains switch and the siren wailed down. She came back with the housekeeper and stood in the study doorway. The Chief Constable had answered the phone.

  ‘This is Harry Hodge, the Deputy Chief Constable here,’ said a strangely controlled voice.

  ‘I know that. I know exactly who it is,’ Sir Arnold yelled back.

  ‘Good, good,’ said the voice, still exercising an unnerving calm. ‘Are you all right? I repeat, are you all right? Take your time replying.’

  Sir Arnold didn’t. It was bad enough standing in the study bollock naked with a middle-aged woman in a startling kimono staring at him and at the blood on the floor . . . ‘Of course I’m fucking well all right. The button got pressed accidentally is all.’

  ‘Good, very good,’ said the Deputy Chief Constable, maintaining his cool. ‘I quite understand. Now are you all right? I repeat, are you all –’

  ‘Listen, Hodge, what do you mean you understand? I’m standing here starkers and you . . .’ Here he turned on Auntie Bea. ‘Fuck off, for Chrissake.’

  ‘Try and keep calm,’ said the wretched Hodge in the same nerveless tone. ‘Everything is under control. Now then. Are you all right? I repeat –’

  ‘You ask me again if I’m all right, Hodge, and so help me God I’ll break your fucking neck. I’ve told you I don’t know how many times I’m all right. How many more times have I got to tell you?’ />
  Over the line he could hear the Deputy Chief Constable asking more or less the same question. Sir Arnold remembered the drill. ‘Hodge,’ he said, with a new controlled calm that was as peculiar in its own way as that of his Deputy, ‘Hodge, I am all right. I repeat, I am all right. Repeat. I am all right.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right then,’ said Hodge almost regretfully. ‘It was a false alarm then? Shall I call off the QRS lads?’

  ‘The who?’ The past few minutes had slowed the Chief Constable still further.

  ‘The Quick Response Squad,’ Hodge said, a new doubt creeping back into his voice.

  ‘Those swine?’ yelled the Chief Constable. ‘Of course call them off at once. Why do you think I phoned you?’

  ‘Phone me, sir? Phoned me? I don’t want to question your judgement at a time like this but in actual fact I phoned you. Are you sure you are quite all right?’

  The Chief Constable made a supreme effort. ‘Hodge, please believe me when I say I am perfectly all right, all right, all right. Got it? I am entirely all right and I want to get back to bed.’

  ‘If you say so, sir. All the same, it seems a pity not to take the opportunity to use this as a training exercise.’

  ‘No. Repeat, no. Repeat, no, on no account. Over and fucking out.’ And putting the phone down the Chief Constable turned back to even more immediate problems.

  7

  The first problem was to get back into the bedroom and have it out with Vy. She was to blame for what had happened. Any reasonable husband coming home and finding some filthy young gigolo in bed with his wife would have acted in a similarly violent manner. In a way what he had done had been rather complimentary to her and showed the right amount of jealousy. There was certainly no need for her to have behaved in that irrational way with the gun. He might have been killed and then where would she have been? On the other hand he had no intention of going back into the bedroom until she’d promised not to do anything dangerous again. Outside the bedroom door he stopped. ‘Darling, darling,’ he called softly. ‘It’s me. You know. Me. Pooh Bear and Wiggly Toes and . . .’

  Inside the bedroom Lady Vy had found her contact lenses and the nature of her mistake. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, not at a time like this. Not with –’

  Sir Arnold hurled himself through the door. Gun or no gun, he had to stop her before she said any more. ‘Hush,’ he yelled in what he supposed was a whisper. And then, more for the benefit of the two women downstairs than for Lady Vy herself. ‘Now, dear, you mustn’t blame yourself. We all make mistakes.’

  ‘Blame myself? Blame myself? I wake up to find you beating someone to death with a bed lamp and –’

  ‘No, dear, no, that’s not quite true,’ he said in a whisper that was practically a bellow. Then, sotto voce, ‘Walls have ears, for Chrissake.’

  Lady Vy looked at him dementedly. ‘Walls have ears? You stand there in the altogether and tell me in some godawful whisper that walls have ears? Are you clean off your trolley?’

  Sir Arnold signalled frantically towards the door. ‘We don’t need any witnesses,’ he said in a conversational tone.

  ‘You may not,’ said Lady Vy. ‘In fact I’m sure you don’t, but as far as I’m concerned –’

  Sir Arnold crossed to the bed and drew back the sheet that was covering Timothy Bright’s naked body. ‘Shut up and listen to me,’ he hissed. ‘I come home and find you tucked up with this. With some foul toyboy you’ve been having it off with in my fucking bed and the sod has the gall to sleep here and snore –’

  He stopped and stared down at Timothy’s scarred knees, hands and arms, not to mention a seriously bruised chest and mangled face, and revised his opinion of Vy. If passionate love was what the poor devil and Vy had been making, he was exceedingly glad he had never succeeded in arousing her sexually to such extraordinary lengths. For a fraction of a second it occurred to him that his wife had been seeing too many Dracula movies. Or cannibal ones. Only the lack of blood on her face-cream convinced him otherwise. He preferred not to look at the brute’s head. The scalp wound was still leaking blood onto the pillow. In any case Lady Vy had his attention now.

  ‘What do you mean “toyboy” and “having it off”, you vile creature?’ she spat with a hauteur that was almost genuine. ‘Do you think I would dream of sleeping with a . . . a callow youth, a mere child?’

  Sir Arnold looked back at the bloke on the bed. It had never occurred to him that his wife could think of someone in his late twenties as a mere child. Or callow, whatever that meant. It didn’t seem natural, somehow. He tried to get back to the issue. ‘What do you expect me to think? If you came home unexpectedly at whatever hour it was in the middle of the night and found a naked girl in bed with me, what would you think?’

  ‘I’d know perfectly well you hadn’t been having normal sex with her,’ Lady Vy hurled back at him. ‘I suppose fellatio might do something for you but you can count me out. It’s too late in my life for that sort of thing.’

  Sir Arnold ignored this obvious attempt to sidetrack him. ‘All right,’ he demanded. ‘Who is he? Just tell me who he is.’

  ‘Who he is?’

  ‘I think I’ve got a right to know that much.’

  ‘You’re asking me . . . ? I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know. You must know. I mean . . .’ Sir Arnold goggled at her. ‘I mean you don’t have some little shit in bed with you without finding out who he is. It’s . . . it’s . . .’

  ‘If you really must know I thought it was you,’ said Lady Vy with revived hauteur.

  The Chief Constable gaped at her open-mouthed. ‘Me? One moment you say I can’t get it up without a mouth job and the next I’m the blighter who has just fucked you rigid.’

  For a moment Lady Vy looked as though she might go for the revolver again. ‘I keep telling you,’ she shouted, ‘nobody did anything. I didn’t even know he was there.’

  ‘You must have known. People don’t just climb into bed with you and you don’t know.’

  ‘All right, I suppose I was vaguely aware of someone getting into the bed but naturally I thought it was you. I mean he stank of dog and booze. How the hell was I to know it was someone else?’

  Sir Arnold tried to draw himself up. ‘I do not stink of dog and booze when I come to bed.’

  ‘Could have fooled me,’ said Lady Vy. ‘Come to think of it, it did.’ She groped over the side of the bed for the gin bottle. Sir Arnold grabbed it from her and swigged. ‘And now,’ she continued when she’d got it back, ‘now you’ve gone and murdered him.’

  ‘Not murdered, for God’s sake,’ he said, ‘manslaughter. Quite different. In cases of manslaughter judges frequently –’

  Lady Vy smiled horribly. ‘Arnie dear,’ she said with a degree of malice that had been fermenting for years, ‘it doesn’t seem to have got through to the thing you call your brain that you are finished, finito, done for and all washed up. Your career is over. All those lovely directorships with big salaries for favours received, all those nice jobs the good old boys like Len Bload were going to hand you for running the Property Protection Service you call your constabulary, all gone bye-bye now. You’re up above the Plimsoll line in excreta, as Daddy used to put it. And it doesn’t matter what some senile old judge, hand-picked by the DPP to keep you out of prison, says. You’re all washed up, baby.’

  Sir Arnold Gonders heard her only subliminally, and in any case he didn’t need telling. There were some crimes even a Chief Constable couldn’t commit with anything approaching impunity, and one of them had to be battering a young man to death with a blunt instrument in his own bed. To make matters worse he couldn’t look to the ex-prime minister for help. She wasn’t in power any longer.

  He took Timothy Bright’s wrist and felt for the pulse. It was, all things considered, surprisingly strong. The next moment he was rummaging in the wardrobe for a torch.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Lady Vy demanded as he shone the light into one of Timothy’s ey
eballs and looked at his iris.

  ‘Drugged,’ he said finally. ‘Drugged to the top of his skull.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Lady Vy, turning a bit weepy now. ‘But look what you’ve done to the top of his skull.’